Student Name: Chih-Hung Cheng id: B01408037 Write a concluding paragraph
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Worksheet #1 Course: Freshman English (With One-Hour Aural Training) Course website: https://ceiba.ntu.edu.tw/1011FE1 Student Name: Chih-Hung Cheng ID: B01408037 Write a concluding paragraph (at least 200 words) to describe what you think of the stories of Huge Herr and Aimee Mullin. In your opinion, are they “disabled”? What do you learn from their stories? Can you relate their stories to your personal experience or the society in Taiwan? [You should first briefly illustrate who they are in the beginning of the paragraph, and then develop your own opinions based on what you observe in their stories.] Aimee Mullins and Hugh Herr are both bilateral amputees. Herr lost his legs in a mountain climbing accident at 17 years of age, whereas Mullins was born without fibula bones in hers. Herr, a physicist and mountain climber, has been able to surpass his climbing ability with new artificial legs designed himself. For Mullins, a competitive runner and a model, when she was just one year old, her doctors had to amputee her legs below the knees. But she never gave up. Aimee became one of the college's best runners and ran against able-bodied runners and participated in the 1996 Paralympics in Atlanta. She also acted in a couple of movies, done modeling and even worked at the Pentagon. From my point of view, I don’t think they are “disabled.” They just don’t even look so. Disability is not the act of being incapable or useless but rather it is the judgment we pass on one another. It's about word value like Aimee said. What people say about other people in bad words will establish a new paradigm and will become a reality. Society disables people, not biology. We perform these differences and construct sections of society according to our own background. Since most of us are “healthy,” our society and economy reproduce “abnormality” and we therefore label people who do not fit these norms. Well, standardization may be in many cases a good thing. But as we shape our perceptions and our culture through our language, Aimee makes an accurate case for change of both the perception in culture and the language. I knew a high school friend in a wheelchair. As we know, he was labeled as disabled. However, in many ways he got superior abilities like positive outlook, memory, social skills, creativity…and my personal favorite, his sense of humor. The hardest parts of life for him was generally caused by systems that do not recognize different abilities, systems that measure certain abilities as being more valuable than others. Now I totally understand how he felt after Aimee’s talk. Like she said, there are unknown powers within ourselves, which perhaps we would never be aware of. Download 4.74 Kb. Share with your friends:
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